John Verbosky had a yard sale. Along with regular yard sale items, John put out six charcuterie boards he’d made from wood and epoxy. “Everything sold. People took my name, and it just took off from there,” he said.
Online videos inspired him to use these materials. “I saw somebody do it — it fascinated me,” he said, adding, “I said I can do that, and I did. I made every mistake in the book.”
While tutorials make it look easy, John said it can be a challenging craft. One mistake (one air bubble or other imperfection) means sanding down the dried epoxy and re-pouring. “You have to re-pour the entire top,” John said. “You can’t wipe out that one little spot.”
Making overly difficult wooden molds and heat seals resulted in early mishaps. Heat created by epoxy setting caused the material to eat through the sealed cracks and spill onto the floor.
He solved this problem by using a silicone baking sheet in a cardboard box for a mold — simple, inexpensive, effective.
Failing to closely follow manufacturer’s directions for mixing epoxy resulted in another mistake: epoxy mixed too fast hardens too quickly, limiting working time.
Mastering the learning curve, he made and remade charcuterie boards. He gifted the very first board he made to his daughter. “I think in the next two months she got eight of them,” John said — boards made while practicing and learning.
charcuterie boards at a yard sale,
with many customers calling for more.
That’s when he knew he had something
and perfected his method of making the
works of art from raw wood.
With experience under his belt, he has worked out the kinks in the process. He buys local hardwood from Mike Holt, in Fairmont. He visualizes the finished product when selecting a live edge board.
“Sometimes it’s the roughest cheapest wood he has,” John said. After taking the wood home, he cleans it, suits up with safety gear and takes a grinder to it.
John slices the cleaned and cut-to-size board down the middle and places it inverted into his mold — the inversion creates a river bank effect framing the epoxy in the center, and straight edges on the outside.
Then he mixes epoxy, adding mica colorant, and pours it into the gap in the board. He polishes the dried board with a food-safe mix of mineral oil and bees wax.
I noticed colors in his work I hadn’t seen before in epoxy and wood charcuterie boards, so I asked him how he chose colors.
“Colors are easy — I’m colorblind,” he said. “I just try everything. … I just start mixing them, and I start looking at them.” He joked that he is the one who sees the hues correctly, and everyone else is wrong.
Once John mastered making charcuterie boards, he got an itch to make something bigger. “I wanted to do a coffee table, and once I conquered that, I did a high-top table,” he said, noting that he had to re-pour the table top several times.
Making a charcuterie board takes five days, and lately John works on them daily.
He named his budding business Coal Country Woodworking, and recently set up at three local shows, two at Mylan Park plus the Mountaineer Week craft show. At the moment he considers this endeavor a hobby with benefits.
John encourages others to try epoxy and woodwork (emphasizing the need for safety gear — always wear gloves and a respirator, dispose of waste materials properly due to the possibility of leftover epoxy self-combusting, and be sure to use food safe materials).
“Hopefully, at the end, you have something somebody likes. Or you like. And if you don’t, you send it to your daughter,” he said.
